This invention relates generally to social networking, and in particular to lightweight messaging systems that communicate a location of a user to another user in a social networking system.
Social networking systems allow users to designate other users as connections (or otherwise connect to or form relationships with other users), contribute and interact with media items, use applications, join groups, list and confirm attendance at events, create pages, and perform other tasks that facilitate social interaction. Messaging in social networks vary from the most private including personal one-on-one messages and emails to the most public messages including posting on profiles as “wall posts,” notifications, invites. The problem with these modes of communication is that they require the user to provide content such as by typing, tagging a picture, adding a video, or otherwise providing content for the message. This requires effort on the part of the user in drafting the message. As a result, a user may procrastinate sending the message, for example, when the user is busy or feels too lazy to provide content for a message.
Social networking systems attempt to provide messaging functionality to their users that the users are likely to use as often as possible. Frequent and regular visits by the users to the social networking system are typically associated with advertising revenue for the social networking system since advertisers are more likely to advertise on systems regularly and frequently visited by users. Accordingly, additional mechanisms of communicating within a social networking system would be desirable, especially mechanisms that are lightweight for the user experience.